Announcing the launch of Open Access Central

Open Access Central was launched today at www.openaccesscentral.com. Open Access Central is brought to you from the team that created BioMed Central, the leading biomedical open access publisher.

Bringing together the open access publishing activities of Science Navigation Group, Open Access Central includes BioMed Central and its newly launched sister site, Chemistry Central. Future open access initiatives such as PhysMath Central will also fall under the Open Access Central umbrella.

BioMed Central Publisher, Matthew Cockerill, says: “The rapid growth of open access publishing in biomedicine has attracted the attention of researchers and funders in other disciplines. It has become clear that open access journals are equally necessary in fields such as chemistry and physics. With the launch of Open Access Central, we are making the open access journal publishing system available to groups of researchers in other fields who wish to start open access journals.”

Open Access Central builds on BioMed Central’s success in biomedicine. Launching its first journals in 2000, BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com) has grown rapidly and today publishes over 160 open access journals, with many more in the pipeline. BioMed Central’s biomedical journals have gone from strength to strength, publishing thousands of peer reviewed articles, and demonstrating their quality with impressive Thomson Scientific (ISI) impact factors (http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/faq?name=impactfactor).

Chemistry Central (www.chemistrycentral.com), also launched today, will publish peer-reviewed research in chemistry and makes it immediately available online with no access charges or subscriptions. The publishers’ website currently features articles from existing open access chemistry journals published with BioMed Central, including Geochemical Transactions and Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry. It also includes chemistry-related content from other BioMed Central journals such as BMC Chemical Biology. Chemistry Central will soon be launching further chemistry journals, including Chemistry Central Journal (http://journal.chemistrycentral.com/), a major new open access title covering all areas of chemistry.

PhysMath Central (www.physmathcentral.com) is planned for launch at a future date, and will feature peer-reviewed research in all areas of mathematics and physics.